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Neoliberal Feudalism's avatar

The U.S. military industrial complex gets massively enriched by the war, of course. The Senate approved the initial $40 billion aid bill with no checks or balances on the aid (Rand Paul tried to insert a special inspector general to oversee the funds but failed), and there have also been many follow-up spends totaling additional tens of billions of dollars with additional funds from allies. According to a CBS documentary only 30% of U.S. supplied arms/munitions reached its final destination. Roughly 10% of U.S. manufacturing output pre-war went into weapons production, or about $220 billion/year, so the money to be made is enormous. Compare this with Russia’s total military budget, which in 2021 was only about $63 billion/year.

The amount of graft and kickbacks to the military industrial complex and American politicians is a significant portion of the aid supplied, with corrupt Ukraine politicians taking a cut and funneling much of the rest of the funds back into America, which is par for the course in Ukraine except in terms of the size of the graft. Additionally Blackrock gets to buy up ultra-depressed Ukrainian assets for pennies on the dollar in coordination with Zelensky.

[As an aside, a similar analysis could be run on the 20 year war in Afghanistan, which fulfilled many U.S. establishment objectives by creating a “forever war” to launder massive amounts of taxpayer funds through the military. An outright military victory would have been bad for this agenda. The Pentagon has never passed an audit and in 2013 it was estimated that $8.5 trillion dollars of Pentagon funds had been “lost”. The Vietnam war was also planned by the establishment as a long slog, filled with dreadful rules of engagement and with the intention of sapping anti-communist vigor, and it succeeded masterfully.]

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Chelie's avatar

When I saw the shot of Pelosi holding up the flag of Ukraine, pretending to care about the people in harms way, it made me sick. Here she goes with pretending with the whole cabal who wants to save the poor Ukrainian people. Meanwhile, we send a stand up comedian billions to squander. Zelensky is a corrupt, inept con artist. Billions of our tax dollars gone. They should have gotten nothing more than humanitarian aid.

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